Nr . / No . 1 – Februar / Février 2000 Intelligent Agents

In an age of rapidly increasing network complexity and diversity, the idea of " bringing intelligence to the network " is becoming more of a necessity than " future work ". Since the early 1990's, agent technology has often been proposed as a way of achieving this more effective, robust and above all autonomous network control. This article provides a brief tour of current trends in network development and discusses the potential for agent based solutions to some of the most pressing communications network problems. Introduction From a network engineer's point of view, a network is a complex system requiring complicated management under very trying domain constraints. To a Distributed Artificial Intelligence researcher, a network is a highly distributed, complex and challenging environment for the application of intelligent systems ([Lewis95], [Maes94], [Weihmayer/Velthuijsen 94]). The idea of distributing communication network control and management tasks by deploying " smart " , " cooperative " and " autonomous " entities in network infrastructures has thus received considerable attention from both the Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) and the Communications Network (CN) communities. As networks become increasingly complex and difficult to control, the ideal of a distributed, intelligent network management and control system is becoming more and more of a necessity. Furthermore, new software and network technologies are revolutionising what can be deployed in the network